Many of you will know from previous posts to the CALJ listserv that CALJ applied to the Department of Canadian Heritage — Canada Periodical Program — for funds to develop an analytics package that would provide each journal with a set of measures of their readership that is easy to understand and can be shared with others i.e., who reads what articles, from what source (your website, an aggregator), where the reader is located, when the reading took place, and what was read (title and abstract, pdf, html). The measures are not many but they provide considerable insight and in these days of measuring everything, the data will come in handy for submissions to funders, and providing feedback to authors.

I am pleased to inform you that we have received funds and that the project will be getting off the ground in the near future.

Rowland Lorimer will be directing the project so all inquiries and comments should be directed to him.

The main work of the study will have two parts.

1. Hire a programmer/data scientist to create a database that will allow the project to create a page (or 2) of summary analytics for each journal composed of the most important measures on online usage (layout, to the extent that it is possible, like Google analytics). It will also compile the data so that CALJ can create annual performance measures for the membership as a whole.

2. Allows journals to easily query their data, e.g., what were the most often read articles in 2017 compared with 2016 on your website.

There may be some room for journals other than those who wrote letters of support to join the pilot group of journals the data of which will populate the database as it develops. Should you be interested in possible participation, please let Rowly know at lorimer@sfu.ca.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Rowly for his skillful work in putting together the grant application for this project. It was no small feat and was effective in persuading Canadian Heritage to fund us.

Suzanne Kettley
President, Canadian Association of Learned Journals/
Executive Director, Canadian Science Publishing